Well, it's all sex sex sex to you women isn't it. Don't you realise that we men just come here to have a good time and dance and not be treated like objects? Now my hair is in a mess and I'm all confused and I just want to go home. Take me home, Marsha! Take me home!

Thursday, July 28, 2005

One has to wonder, why do we celebrate our birthdays? We didn't celebrate them when we were actually born - we were too busy doing something else at the time. And if we actually remembered what it was like, the memory would probably be so traumatic that we wouldn't be celebrating it, anyway.

Birthdays, birthdays, birthdays. You know, as someone* once said, being born is really like dying, in reverse. First you're not there, and then you are. Which gives me an idea. What if, instead of celebrating our birth every year, we celebrated our death? I mean, we might as well celebrate it, while we've still got time. It'll give us something to do, rather than being shit-scared about the prospect. Think about it: instead of actually missing out on our own funerals, we'd get to go along, too.

Naturally, we don't know when we're going to die - which is kind of the whole point. Holding our own funeral would be an excellent excuse to get drunk all day, every day. You know, just in case.

Then again, maybe I'll just return to my mother's womb. Nice and safe; no fear of dying there. I'll just call Mum up in a second ...

The womb's a fine and private place But none, I think, do there embrace ...What do you think?

You may be in serious need of an anger-fix, courtesy of The Melbourne Age. It's the paper that's guaranteed to send even Goldilocks into full-blown, mouth-frothing indignation. Yes, you may be skipping through the fields picking tulips, but after glancing at the Melbourne Age, you'll feel more like committing cold-blooded murder in a vicious and sadistic manner!

It's got something for every one! For the Righties, it has articles by various terror appeasers. And for the Left-wingers, it offers a wide variety of pieces by Centrists - guaranteed to send even the most gentle socialist into an ideological fury!

Yes, The Melbourne Age has everything the Anger-needy could ever want. We even have at least three cut-out pictures of this countries leader, John Howard, in every issue. Stare at this unlikely figure of authority and Hate to your hearts content!

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Magicians are really useless aren't they. Showmen, they call themselves which just about sums up how pointless they are. A show, which is a man. Hoo fucking rah. Anyway, you have to cut them the slack, they do not pretend that they are of any use to mankind at all, they just put people in boxes and cut them with knives, or they get in a straightjacket and then escape, which are skills they could very well use in real life, but choose not to, no, they show us these great feats as an act of entertainment.

Perhaps they're just trying too hard...

THE WORST MAGICIAN IN THE WORLD

Name:Ephraim Geuconical Smythe (born Fred Murray, of the Widgee Murrays).

Birthplace:Moulamein, NSW, Australia

Profession:THE WORST MAGICIAN IN THE WORLD

The man who was later to become the unfamous Ephraim Geuconical Smythe, Magician, was born one evening in the late nineteenth century in the small town of Moulamein as Frederick James Murray. He was later to claim that his birth was the result of a union between the chief of a lost Kazakh tribe (who had somehow travelled from the Ural mountains to the Simpson desert) and a camel, but his origins are not quite so exotic. What little we know are as follows:His father was a travelling mud salesman from Ballarat who was down on his luck, while his mother was a brothel owner in the town of Widgee, a small country town with a population of two-and-a-half people. (Only one of these people - Smythe’s mother - was actually a human being.)All his life, Ephraim was to strive to live up to his parents reputation for mediocrity and nonsuccess. He would fail.

During his formative years, Smythe moved around from country town to country town with his parents, experiencing the joys of the Gulgong Mud Markets and the Leadville Dust Fair. This rich but now forgotten period of Australian history has been written about in Professor Gary Gamonicle's history, The Dirt Rush.

We are fortunate to have a school report from that period:

Euston Public School

Report for student:Fred Murray

Mathematics

F

English, Grammar and Composition

F

French

F

German

F

Sport

F

Home Economics

B+

COMMENTS

"Dull"

"Stupid"

"Half-witted"

"Ugly as well"

"The most singularly cretinous student it has ever been my misfortune to tutor"

"A talented cook. It is such a pity that we have never been able to afford to give him any FOOD to cook with. He does such wonders with the dirt..."

In his early teens, Fred became interest in the magic arts. He procured himself a ventriloquist's doll and began practicing to throw his voice. Unfortunately, he never mastered the art, and usually ended up sounding like a kangaroo on heat. It is at this time that he began arranging small shows amongst friends. They were so horrified by the results that they began paying him not to perform. With this unlikely encouragement, young Fred decided to become a magician.

*

Some months later, during 1913, Fred had put together a show of 'Jugglery & Illusion; an Entertaining Dyversion from the Current Troubles of the World. He travelled to several towns with his show, including Balranald, Ivanhoe, and Woolongong. In the show, he attempted to juggle two swords, four flaming brands, several pots of acid, and one red-bellied black snake.He was, as one critic put it, "Unpractised, untrained, unsuitable, untalented, and under severe danger of serious injury or even death. Should not the authorities stop this sort of thing from happening?"During his shows, Fred narrowly averted being bitten, burnt, decapitated, and skewered repeatedly. Nevertheless, he did once manage to perform a haircut with the flaming brands, and on another occasion, cut his toenails with the flying sword. Naturally, his shows were an outrageous success, and the people flocked to the theatres in their ones and twos. Refusing to be disheartened by this reception, Freddy changed his name to Ephraim Geuconical Smythe, and continued to tour around, travelling once to Sydney, once to Newcastle, and twice to Melbourne. It was when he was at Melbourne the second time that he met cockney magician Arthur Frazer.

Frazer made a great impression on Smythe. His celebrated act never changed. He would ask an unsuspecting gentlemen on to the stage. He would then take the gentleman’s tie and cut it. Then he would look the gentlemen in the eye, say, "Wipe that smile off yer face, yer cunt!", and pat him on the cheek before pushing him back into the audience. Then the stage-hands would point guns at the audience, and move around, assisting themselves to any coins, notes, or pieces of jewellery that they liked.Smythe requested to become Frazer's assistant. According to eyewitness reports, here's how the meeting went:

Nevertheless, Smythe continued to be impressed by Artie, and shortly afterwards, he travelled to England with a new magic show he had been preparing.

*

I wish that I could say that London, the thriving metropolis, and free-trade capital of the world, taught Smythe a little more about magic, but it didn't. He continued to put on dreadful shows to ever-dwindling audiences. His audience average fell from two to one, then from one to none, and it probably continued into the negative figures as well, if that is possible. If anybody could have achieved it, Smythe would have.

Still, Smythe had now developed several acts.

The Disappearing Woman Act

In this act, Smythe placed his lovely assistant in a box and draped a shroud over box and assistant. Following this, Smythe removed the shroud and opened the box to reveal his assistant still in the box.The act concluded with loud boos, and rotten tomatoes, dead fish, and bricks being thrown at Smythe.

The Rope Ladder Trick

Smythe would walk on stage with a recorder and attempt to charm a rope-ladder from out of his hat by playing it. When this failed to work, he would fall to screaming and shouting at the rope ladder.Although some members of the audience derived great satisfaction from seeing Smythe become so infuriated by this, others became infuriated themselves. Things came to a head one night when an Indian fakir came on to the stage ordering Smythe to stand back. He did, indeed, charm the rope out of Smythe’s hat, but for some reason it formed itself into a noose. The fakir gestured at Smythe, pointing from him to the rope, but for some reason, Smythe seemed fairly reluctant to continue on with the act. He rarely performed it after that.

The Pick-a-Card, Any Card Act

In this act, Smythe would invite a member of the audience up on to the stage to shuffle and cut a deck of cards, promising that he would guess the Suite and Number of any card that the audience member wanted to pick. While the audience member shuffled the pack, Smythe would attempt to sneak off the stage. Possibly he did not believe the audience could see him.Generally, he would be forced back on to the stage by an angry mob before being punched in the face by the original audience member. This act proved quite popular, and helped to revive Smythe's flagging audience numbers.

Smythe travelled from country to country, and state to state, and his unfame passed to a state of infamy. The awfulness of his acts had become a topic of international talk; and it is suggested by some that the socialist policy of erecting rigorous barriers to international trade were made popular because of Smythe's international notoriety.

Indeed, not all of Smythe's acts were harmless. As he expanded his repertoire still further, accidents were known to happen. Take his infamous 'Woman In The Box' act, which he first performed in Italy. In this act, a woman was placed in a box and Smythe would proceed to cut the box in half. For some moments the woman would continue smiling, then the smiles would break into screams and Smythe would adopt a look of grim concentration as the blood spattered upon his face. He went through – literally – several servants this way; and he was banned in several countries.Nevertheless, the Germans found his act quite amusing, and once, when he was performing his act in the Pacific Islands, the Islanders actually proved quite cooperative, and promised to provide another assistant if he performed the act on the following night.

*

Sometimes, Smythe even achieved proper magic, but paradoxically, even this was in the context of failure.

On one occasion, Smythe was performing as a Cabaret act in Venice, alongside Fritz Frinkleburger's 102-piece quartet[1]. He promised the audience that he would put 'a rabbit into my hat, and pull out the same rabbit!'

The audience were completely underwhelmed. But their underwhelment quickly turned to terror when, instead of pulling out a rabbit, Smythe pulled out a rhinoceros who, enraged at being caught in the hat, went wild and rampaged through the orchestra, decimating the Frinkleburger quartet. Only two cor-anglais players escaped unscathed, along with Frinkleburger and Smythe. The musicians subsequently got back together as a new minimalist group, the 'Frinkleburger All-star Septet!' The rhino later drowned in the canals.

On another occasion, Smythe was cooking chicken soup for his wife while she lay in the bed, sick with cold. He did not know, until too late, that he had somehow managed to create the elixir of love, and when he fed it to his wife, she became immediately fixated on the first thing she saw – the flugelhorn that hung on the far wall. Indeed, she had fallen deeply in love with it, and the pair eloped first thing in the morning. She hardly ever wrote to Smythe, except to describe in lurid and intimate detail the sexual positions she was trying out with the flugelhorn in bed. And if you've ever been out with a flugelhorn, you'll know there are many.

Despite later attempts to rediscover the formula for the elixir of love, Smythe never succeeded, although he did poison several pets and his Great Aunt Esmerelda in the process.

*

Smythe had become an international fugitive, and had lost everything – wife and respectability. At the age of fifty he had nothing to live for. He therefore decided, on the the 25th of March 1943, to end it all. He climbed to the top floor of a hotel in New York city and threw himself out the window.Typically, he did not succeed at this, either. Instead of falling to the ground, some unpredicted and hitherto unknown law of gravity caused him to go rocketing into the sky, narrowly missing a cormorant on the way up. And for all we know, he may be still going on, even now.

[1] "That's 98 more than in the usual quartet!", as one promotional poster put it. Frinkleburger was quite a musical innovator, and also patented the electronic oboe.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

"I'm not going to lie to you, mate. I hate it when people lie to you. Can you give me some spare change so I can go and buy some cheap booze and get wasted?" - Beggar on Bourke Street.

So, apparently at work we're going to have to go to some Walk Against Want thing later this year. You know, wander down the streets for an hour or so, get sponsored, and send the sponsorship money to some charity or the other.

I'm not sure I see the point. Sure, it's a good thing to do Good Things, but why does it have to be so much work? I'd prefer something else:

The Leisurely Sit Down Against Need!

The Ten-Hour Nap Against World Poverty!

But nobody seems to want to sponsor it.

Then again, what can you expect? One of the most popular charity events in Australia is the forty hour famine. You voluntarily stop eating for two days, in order to raise money for people who have to stop eating, compulsorily, for their whole lives. That's right. In order to end world hunger, you perpetuate it.

Call me a cynical right-wing penny-pinching heartless fuckface bastard, if you will (No, please! No one ever calls me that!), but does this stuff really work?

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Of course, being a venerable old fogey myself, I am firmly of the opinion that they should be outlawed, but until Mr. Menzies starts answering my letters, we'll just have to let that be.

But you know, I was taking my constitutional stroll this morning, when I came across a group of three young scalliwags discoursing excitedly about some book or another. My ears are not what they used to be, but it seems they were talking about 'Gary Cotter', whoever that was.Now, even though I am old, that is not to say that I am not 'with it' or 'up with the homies'. After doing some research on my Inter Net, I have discovered that books about this 'Gary Cotter' fellow seem to be quite the thing.

As far as my keen eyes could discern, the books about this Gary Cotter fellow go something like this:

Gary Cotter is a student at the Bogfarts school of Hitchcraft and Lizardry. *He makes plenty of friends there, like Ron Wheezy, and Hamboney Granger.But he also makes enemies. The most important of these is Vord Oldy Mort, or Bored Mouldy Port, or some such person. I don't know, I can't remember his name properly.

Hmmph. If this is what passes for entertainment nowadays, then I don't know what the world is coming to. Reading! In my day, we'd actually do educational things to pass the time, like look at paintings of bulls on cave walls.Which reminds me. Isn't it time for my daily whipping? Marsha! Marsha!

*Of course, if he grew up with me, he would have been sent to a respectable school of grammar and sadomasochism, but that's not the point.

Friday, July 15, 2005

A few months ago, I ended up in Melbourne more or less by accident. Now, I've finally moved into a place on Victoria Street in Brunswick, so it looks like I'm stuck here.

Not that that's a bad thing. I've been enjoying Melbourne immensely. It is, amongst other things, an exceedingly geometrical city. The streets are long and straight, and intersect one another at ninety degree angles; the buildings are delightfully cubic.

This makes for some interesting sculptures:

The Brunswick neighbourhood that I've moved into is still fairly working class, though I'm sharing a house with a writer and an accounts manager. Most of the buildings around here are either warehouses or converted warehouses:

There's a few cafes down the road, though down this end of Lygon Street they have become a little sparse. My favourite is the cafe owned by the fat Italian man that never seems to have anybody in there. When I paid for a coffee there a few mornings ago, he said:

"Thank you, Gentlemen,"

Using the plural form, making me wonder where the rest of Me had gone.

How do you tell if civilisation is in decline? Is it the degrading standard of manners? The falling apart of educational, scientific, and cultural institutions? Or is it something else entirely, like - say - the type of toilet paper we use to wipe our bums?

If it's the third option, then Western civilisation has no hope. Walk into any supermarket, and you'll find rows of shelves devoted to the type of paper we bring in close proximity with our arses. Shape, colour, scent, and texture - all play an essential part in the formation of 'the toilet roll' (tm). But really, what sort of person is it that wants to bring an aloe-vera-scented filigree fragment of tissue, imprinted with pictures of birds and dolphins, into contact with their nether regions and use it to wipe away the residual fragments of excreta still stuck there? How ethically twisted and sick do we have to become to make colour, shape, scent, and texture a regular - no, an essential - requirement of our daily bathroom activities?

Did our Anglo-saxon forebears really travel all the way around the world, invent capitalism, reinvent democracy, settle Australia, America, Canada, and parts of Africa, with this in mind? If you ask me, they would have used a few fragments of old linen they had lying around for such a purpose. It's time for a revolution, ladies and gentlemen. It's time to reject such so-called luxuries as 'scented toilet tissue', and to return to a more simpler lifestyle. Rise up as one, and demand from the supermarkets that they remove all lemon-scented-printed pieces of toilet tissue. Your bottom is not simply a tender, trembling, palpitating, lily-white piece of flesh which demands to be treated like a king. No! It is a strong bottom, a powerful bottom, a bottom that could conquer the world! It is disrespect - yes, disrespect, we say - to be bringing these flabby, scented rags in contact with our bottoms! BOTTOMS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

I am not saying you should start wiping your arse with sandpaper. (Not unless you want to, that is. Who am I to tell you what to do with your bum?) I am just saying that your bottom deserves better than what it's getting at the moment.

I got sick last week. I was awake all night, with my stomach doing flip-flops. Next morning I got up, had a shower, and promptly retched in the toilet. I climbed back into bed and forgot about breakfast, and got out of bed later and had another shower. It wasn't pleasant, and actually, I thought for a moment that I might d...

Well, no, that's not true. I didn't think I was going to die, and I damn well knew what the problem was: that I'd eaten ten slices of 3-day-old cheesecake the day before. And if you ask me, it's just this sort of grumbling about sickness that has made us what we are today - a society that is addicted to sickness.Don't believe me? Just open up the phone book to Medical Practicioner. There you'll find a long list of practicioners, including:

OsteopathsHomeopathsNaturopaths

And so on. And so on. It's enough to make you sick. And in fact, the only medical practicioner that I'd consider going to nowadays is a Sociopath. Sure, they may not be a 'real' medical practicioner, but that description doesn't extend to 95 percent of the other quacks out there, either. Consider the diagram:

Profession

What They Do

Homeopath

Diagnose real medical problems and prescribe mythical solutions

Naturopath

Diagnose mythical medical problems and prescribe mythical solutions

Sociopath

Doesn't care about your problems and will threaten to shoot you if you don't leave.

On the whole, I think, the sociopath comes out as slightly better than the other two - or certainly more honest. And when was the last time you went to the doctor and got honesty?But let's consider the reactions of our medical experts to some common ailments:

Profession

Ailment

Solution

Homeopath

Stress

Prescribes you a drink of water which has been infused with 'healing homeopathic powers'

Naturopath

Plays you a CD - 'The Greatest Whale Song Hits of All Time'

Sociopath

Shouts at you in an attempt to make you leave.

Homeopath

Leprosy

Prescribes you a drink of water which has been infused with 'healing homeopathic powers'

Naturopath

Takes a blue crystal out of their drawer, and start rubbing it up and down your body in a disturbing and suggestive manner.

Sociopath

Hides in the cupboard and peeks out every now and then until you are gone.

Homoepath

Death

Prescribes you a drink of water which has been infused with 'healing homeopathic powers'

Naturopath

Takes out a couple of scented candles, sets them at different corners of the room, acccording to its feng-shui properties, and sets them alight in an attempt to align your chi.

Sociopath

Sits you down in a chair, gives you a cup of tea and some scones, and starts talking to you. You're perhaps the best friend a sociopath could ever have. The rigamortis, decay, and maggots aren't a problem, because at least you don't complain about them.

I think the Sociopath has the right idea.

Anyway, the thing is, everyone gets sick. It's a fact of life, like death. But if sickness is inevitable, we might as well have fun in the meantime. Eat too much, get drunk, have sex, get sick, die. That should be our motto. Cheerio!

Note: for more about Homeopathy, Naturopathy, Allopathy, Osteopathy, or many other types of pathys, ologys, and isms, see the Australian Skeptics website.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Here's some comics I drew the other week. I'm quite fond of them. Their great advantage is that they are drawn from the perspective of a vision-deprived person, and therefore require no artistic talent on my part whatsoever.

It's Friday. I'm sitting in the office at the end of a long shift - I've been working since 9.30 in the morning, and it's now 9.00 pm at night. The work itself is ridiculously simple. We have to type long strings of numbers (and no one seems to know what the numbers are counting) into a database (though no one seems to know why, exactly). Or sometimes, just for a change, we have to look at long strings of numbers other people have typed into a database, and retype them. And during the breaks, we go into the coffee room and swear at our supervisor behind her back.

Chris asks how long I've been working for today. I tell him. He responds by offering me a snack from a bag of nuts he's been carrying. I take one.

It's then that it occurs to me that I've been working, quite literally, for peanuts. *

*And anyone who makes jokes along the lines of 'nibble on another mans nuts' can go and stand in the far corner!

Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun. If the sun don't come, you get a tan from standing in the English rain. I am the eggman. Whoo! They are the eggmen. Whoo! I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob.I think we can all agree with that.